Ep 67: Don’t let the headlines fool you. Nobody knows how life started
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Don’t let the headlines fool you. Nobody knows how life started
This is probably the least coherent episode to date. Though the precursors of life can apparently be produced by processes taking place anywhere from the deep sea to deep space, how to get from those starting chemicals to a living cell is still unknown. Rather than a lack of theories, there are just too damn many of them, all of them seemingly at least plausible, and little or no way to decide between one or another. Perhaps they all happened. Perhaps none of them. Perhaps the actual process has yet to be described. Perhaps pieces of the puzzle simply took too long, or require temperatures and pressures that cannot be reproduced in a laboratory.
Here’s a link to a Nova special on this subject that covers it much better than I have. Mind you, they had 45 minutes to do it in, rather than the 9 minutes and change I had.